The Daily Technology News

THE CHALLENGE

Today, there is a growing pool of Bangladeshi migrant and knowledge workers in Malaysia. These are a quite nationalistic group of people who love staying in touch with the latest news of Bangladesh. The only drawback for them is that most of them do not read and write English well, and most foreign labors are neither connected to the Internet nor have the time to keep up with the newest updates.

THE SOLUTION

OBD stands for Out Bound Dialing. The machine platform will call selected Digi subscribers (foreign workers) from a given database and play a pre-recorded interactive promo message inviting them to subscribe to the news service.

Users will then be able to respond by pressing the given keys and can directly subscribe different IVR services by pressing the ‘One’ (1) key. Once they press 1, the system will automatically make them subscribers of that certain service and they can listen that service on the go, anytime, anywhere; also, the same system can deduct the subscription fees from their mobile credit balance. An SMS confirmation message will further be sent to verify credit usage.

KEY BENEFITS DELIVERED

Mobile Advertising. As most of the migrant workers in Malaysia do not have internet connection and mostly they are not reachable by conventional media (e.g. TV, News Paper, Website FM Radio), mobile advertisement is the only solution to reach them, as most of them has mobile phones. Also, as most of them are not familiar with English alphabets, English language as a medium normally does not have much impact on them. To ease this problems and to cater this huge population, voice based advertisement like Automatic Out Bound Dialing (OBD) has become the unsung hero.

Reaching People from All over Malaysia. OBD provided the unique opportunity to ssd-tech and DiGi to reach out to customers from all over Malaysia. As Bangladeshi migrants stay in different remote places in a very scattered fashion, it is not very easy to reach them by any other medium. OBD provides a very personalized way to reach them personally and promote the services they want.

THE RECOGNITION

Now, Bangladeshi migrant workers in Malaysia can listen to news of their own land on the go, in their own familiar lingo – without ever having to feel out of touch or homesick. The Digi OBD is a highly personalized service offered to thousands of Bangladeshis, enabling them a direct channel to stay updated – affordably and conveniently. It does not matter if they are not connected to the Internet, not on Facebook, or cannot access through FM radio. They only need to plug-in to Digi OBD on their hand sets to stay connected. SSD-TECH plans to expand this service to the world to benefit foreign workers, everywhere!

THE CHALLENGE

In Bangladesh, G-Series is the largest music producer of Bangla songs. Over the past years, sales of CDs, albums and cassettes have dwindled dramatically and these instruments are fading away into oblivion in the new overpowering dawn of MP3s and downloads. Digital piracy is fast becoming the reigning king of the musical landscape and music label companies, like it or not, must reinvent themselves or become irrelevant.How would a company like G-Series therefore keep their music both relevant and compelling?

THE SOLUTION

SSD-TECH worked in partnership with G-Series to launch the new Mobile Radio, an IVR-based music radio (jukebox) service, which can also be described as “live streaming radio on mobile networks”.

Employing a convenient “subscription service” model with weekly free minutes, Mobile Radio was a huge hit upon launch. This service was the first of its kind in the market. Mobile subscribers all over Bangladesh could call a number and enjoy intelligent and non-stop radio service. They could also subscribe to new albums as G-Series secured exclusive rights to release albums of various famous artistes. The Mobile Radio platform protects musicians’ rights by discouraging re-recording and piracy of music.

KEY BENEFITS DELIVERED

Intelligent, customizable music on the go The Mobile Radio is an intelligent, non-stop music playing station akin to RM radio with extended capability of creating automated playlists, which can be automatically played out whenever the service is accessed. It can track songs heard by the subscriber over time and play a selection based on previously heard songs. It also has the added functionality of downloading tracks, setting them as ringtone, background music or ring2me jingle.

Music for All Mobile Radio offers a myriad collection of songs categorized in languages (more than 20 language categories), genres, eras and moods making it a prime service for users of all types. It boasts an extensive regional and devotional content housed in a library of more than 100k songs, appealing to a wide range of listeners.

THE RECOGNITION

The Mobile Radio won Best Mobile Music Service for Airtel at the Asia Mobile Awards 2008, MACAU. The service has garnered around 100,000 subscribers to date, and is especially popular among the younger generation of music aficionados

By partnering with modern artistes and securing exclusive album release rights, the Mobile Radio also serves as an ideal launch pad for jump-starting the careers of young and upcoming music stars, helping local musicians break into the competitive scene and giving them a cost effective platform to be heard. While the conventional music label does not seem to be raking in substantial ROI for music label companies anymore, Mobile Radio keeps music fresh, protected and user-friendly – appealing to the larger Bangladeshi majority of mobile phone subscribers.

No doubt it’s the OTT players that have given the global telecom industry the sustained biggest blow in telecom’s industry. Third-party Internet voice applications like Skype, WhatsApp, Viber have caused a multibillion-dollar toll on the global telecommunications’ voice business. When it’s the performance of telco’s core competence, the show of telco’s VAS business is even bleaker. OTT players are offering billions of contents and services in the world, and many of them have strong user bases. And, why not! People trust banks for financial services; news channels/portals/ for news; music labels and entertainment channels for entertainment. However, other than the global giants, localized and niche OTT’s have challenges to realize their growth potentials. Monetization remains to be the biggest bottleneck for niche and localized OTT players, particularly in the Asia and the African markets. Plus, as most OTT’s start with limited investment, the ROI of the promotion and acquisition spends needs be optimized. Also, analytics on the TG is another arena that, given proper support, OTT’s can ride on to thrive.

Though both Telco’s and OTT’s have unique challenges, spaces are there to collaborate very much on their core competencies and natural courses. And, this not only answers their challenges; also, generate greater value better business for both. So, Collaboration between OTT Providers and Telco’s could open up a completely new arena of content & service business for today’s content-hungry customers. Mobile wallets with the telco’s are best answer for the OTT’s monetization challenges. Bundling of content & services of the OTT’s and Telco’s can offer a greater value-for-money for the customers of both. Telco’s again comes as a suitable source for almost all the data and insights to their market and product segmentation.

Now, OTT’s need to look for suitable solutions that enable them to realize the full potential of the matchmaking and OTT’s to reach the critical mass. To grow really big, OTT’s have to manage their value-chain components in a very structured form as well as approach. Let’s have a look at the major components that OTT’s should be eying to:

Content Management System

The content and/or services OTT’s varies in type – lifestyle, news & info, transactional, e-commerce etc.; in nature – audio or video; in delivery channels – app, wap, mobile site, SMS, IVR etc.; sourcing-wise – some the OTT’s themselves produce, others they procure from external sources. Now, managing the contents according to type, nature, channel or source is a major task as this is master inventory from which contents are delivered to consumers as per their desire and charging is done. Again, there are some contents that are channel-specific and hence sourcing and formats of them require customizations on the very onset of productions. For subsequent strategic actions like offers, campaign, bundling etc. proper management of content becomes even more critical. So, OTT’s should be looking for a Content Management System that can support these benefits. Also, the capacity of the Content Management System is also another area to look into as the system should offer scalability.

Charging Gateway

This is the most sensitive support that an OTT usually requires. As OTT’s contents may vary, so does the charging modalities – subscription-based, pay-per-use, both – and amounts. Now, failure to manage these myriad charging modalities is actually suicidal for the OTT’s. The scenario gets even more complicated when there are promotions or campaigns or bundling offers.

Besides charging the subscribers, the amount collected are usually needs to be settled among multi-parties – content providers, platform providers etc. As partnerships are usually on revenue-sharing (royalty) basis, there remains the constant requirement for partner settlements. Thus, the charging system/gateway that the OTT’s will use should support this as well for efficient business management.

Business Intelligence

Though you have contents of very good quality, you may not generate business unless you place them to the ones desiring them. That’s why profiling of your TG, subscribers and categorization of your content (primarily will take place in the Content Management System) are critical. Being able to profile your subscribers will enable you to recommend the (type of) content to the subscriber looking for that based on their search/interest/usage history. It is this profiling and recommendation capacity that differentiates the OTT’s having the same quality of content and it has direct impact on the top-line. So, other than good a Content Management System, OTT’s will also need a robust Business Intelligence (BI) tool to derive the required info from a barrage of data generated every moment from interactions with their subscribers and TG.

As the OTT Player is going to be next “big boss” in the domain of content and services, they have to be prepared with the right system/system components to efficiently cater the market and grow themselves. They have to keep in mind that content and service industry is going to bank on them and billions of subscribers are going to be their loyal bases. So, at this primary stage, equipping themselves with the solution(s) offering the above business benefits is critical for their next leap!

Bangladesh Context

Mobile users 130m

Internet users 50m

Smartphone users 7m

Feature phone with Internet 4.3m

Smartphone growth rate close to 1m/month during peak sales seasons. We can consider yearly 10m

For most of the smartphone users, they have jumped the stages of PC to Laptop to mobile internet phones to smartphones. Also, not all had internet in their first phones. Only a privileged section of the latest generation had it all from the beginning – smartphones with internet. A huge number of non-internet devices – around 80.0 M – in use at present is reducing fast. Yet a conservative estimate – it will take around 5-7 years to have 100% mobile users to become mobile-internet users. And, this is primarily a urban scenario! The metamorphosis in the rural/sub urban landscape is not as fast. A mobile set is still a shared-gadget among family members for many. Mobile phone is considered to be an investment at the bottom of the pyramid and thus mainly earning members have mobile sets.

Literacy rate is a major bottleneck for internet penetration, which cannot be changed overnight. Majority of the area are more or less media-blind especially if we consider radio or print media. TV has a higher penetration considering shared viewership. Marketing and Sales is highly distribution-dependent and retailers play a major role in product communication and sales. Popularity of bKash and other mobile banking services has added a new dimension for business and payment modalities.

Under these circumstances, the mass does not translate ‘Digital’ to Facebook, Youtube, Google etc.; mobile is still the ‘digital’ for the mass. Plus, large OTT players like Facebook, Google, Apple etc. are ecosystems on their own. Participating in that ecosystem requires lots of national level readiness specially flow of payments, literacy rate of the consumers and above everything economic viability for the users to consume. It seems this will endure in the foreseeable future. Thus, Digital Marketing is still (and will be) a game to be played on the mobile platform for the masses!

Leveraging Mobile as a Digital Marketing Media

It is high time we considered Mobile as the Digital for Bangladesh and leverage on the Voice and SMS channels as much as possible as this is the only media that reaches almost the entire universe of the mass/rural people. Immediate opportunities are Voice Based marketing campaigns – everyone can dial and follow voice instruction. Mobile devices can offer personalized delivery and communication can be interactive. Providing incentive in the form of Top-up is easier compared to other offers. Many can read SMS and if the SMS is in Bengali then the coverage is much higher. Now most of the handset supports Bengali and Government has a regulation – any mobile phone sold in Bangladesh must support Bengali character set

Simultaneously, we should also leverage on mobile optimized web sites considering non-smart internet phone popularity. This will cover the Smartphones as well also cover up device operating system heterogeneity (android, iOS etc). A very strong and tech savvy Top-of-the-Pyramid with mid/high end devices and internet connection is also emerging fast. The segment is growing and has higher penetration than print and radio.

As the mobile ecosystem can cover the entire cycle – starting from communication to sales to payment and for digital services it covers delivery as well, more focus should be given on localization and leverage on interaction capability of mobile channels e.g. voice, SMS and web/data.

In this context – emergence and identification of market niches and serving them profitably is an eventuality and collaboration between Mobile Operators and Local Service Providers/Business will benefit everyone. In this context my view is to leverage on the mobile network and the distribution network of mobile operators to design, develop, communicate, sell, collect payment and finally deliver through mobile operators should be primary option to choose for digital market/lifestyle of Bangladesh if not whole SEA.

We will converge sometimes with the conventional digital world around smart devices and high speed internet soon in about 5 years. But it will be a new ecosystem that even may shape the international digital context. I think we are in a position to drive innovation from our region to the world rather only following and adapting the western lifestyle/technology.

It’s mid-January, so it’s likely that your early pay check for Christmas has already run out, or is about to.

Fear not though, tech has come to save you (sort of, provided you don’t need any serious cash) with apps that let you earn real money from an AnGoogdroid or iOS device.

There’s certainly no shortage to choose from, but many don’t have the glowing reviews you’d want, given the investment of time required – and some seem to be an outright scam.

I’ve avoided ones that seem to be attracting a lot of problems and shied away from apps that require you to endlessly watch video ads or fill out long surveys to earn cash, though there are those too, if that’s your thing.

Naturally, a lot of the apps will require your input or personal data in exchange for a payout, but then TNW’s Web-savvy readers probably knew that already, didn’t you?

Bitwalking

Bitwalking is a new app that lets you earn Bitwalking dollars (BW$) simply for going about your daily routine.

Once you get in, all you have to do is keep moving to start earning. You will need to do rather a lot of walking though – somewhere around 10,000 steps for 1 BW$. If you spend all day wandering around for your job anyway, however, what is there to lose?

At launch, the company said you’d be able to redeem your earnings against items offered through its own store, or transfer the cash to your bank account. The service is still being tested though, so could be subject to change in the future.

Slidejoy

Slidejoy is an Android-only app that certainly isn’t going to make you rich, but nor do you really have to do anything to eventually get a payout from the service easier.

In a nutshell, it puts ads and news on your lockscreen, and in exchange you earn ‘Carats’ that can be exchanged for real money and checked into your PayPal account.

For signing up you get 20 Carats, and you’ll need 100 or more to check anything out – 100 Carats equals $1.

The number of Carats you get each day can vary, so it might be slow going but if you can tolerate ads on your lockscreen, it’s free money. You don’t get any additional Carats for interacting with the ads either, so there’s no incentive to click if you’re not interested in what’s on offer.

Google Opinion Rewards

This is one that most certainly falls into the ‘never going to make you much cash’ category, but for Android users it’s a bit of a no-brainer.

In short, once you’ve installed the app, it’ll pop up a survey every now and again. In exchange for answering a few questions – they’re never more than a few questions, and it tells you how many are in each survey – you get a small amount of credit added directly to your Google Play balance, where it can be redeemed across movies, games, apps and anything else for sale there.

The amount that you get is small, but each survey takes such a short time that filling it in is worthwhile, provided you’re happy sharing the data. It’s worth pointing out that not all the surveys have a payout, but the majority do.

ezyShot

ezyshot is touting itself as a social network that lets you earn money simply by having people access your updates – whether that’s photos, ‘behind the scenes’ tours of your life, imparting specialist knowledge or anything else.

Ezyshot says that its users are a mix of “celebrities, musicians, models, sports stars, entertainers, the girl/guy next door and you.”

However, realistically (judging from the fact that almost all the ‘most popular’ profiles appear to be either ‘hot girl’ or ‘hot guy’ offering fitness advice), unless you’re an attractive or semi-notable figure, you’re not likely to make a whole lot of cash from the platform. There’s no harm in trying though, if you have expertise to share that someone else might pay for.

You get to set how many ezyCoins it costs for people to view your updates (billed monthly) and send you messages (which you can set to free, if you wish).

If you do happen to find yourself with a bulging ezyCoin balance, you can transfer them to your bank or PayPal account at a rate of $0.40 per 10 coins, so 100,000 ezyCoins would get you $4,000.

It’s worth noting, however, that ezyShot takes a 50/50 cut of your coins, so to get to that 100,000 example figure, you’d actually need to earn 200,000 coins.

It’s just for Android devices for now, but the company says an iOS version is on the way.

Mobee

This is one just for users in the US, but if you’re willing to do a few mystery shopper tasks (going into stores and checking stock levels of a specific item, timing how long customer service takes, taking photos etc.) then you can earn cash in exchange for your time.

The app displays Missions on a map view for you to find a nearby assignment. Once you’ve completed it, the team manually checks the submission and then credits you the points, which can be exchanged for gift cards, cash or other rewards.

Snapwire

Snapwire is another image-based money-making app in this list, but it’s not quite the same as any of the others in this list as it puts the emphasis on the photographer, rather than just the photographs.

This isn’t so much an app for the everyday snapper as for the semi-pro/professional photographer.

There are two options for selling your photos: requests and challenges, or in a more conventional marketplace – though Snapwire hand-curates your best snaps, making them searchable and including them in the stock image database.

The requests and challenges route requires you to start as an ‘Explorer’ by submitting images to Snapwire Challenges to earn points. Once you’ve leveled up, you’ll be able to take part in paid buyer Requests or take direct commissions from clients.

Photographers keep 70 percent of earnings through the marketplace route.

MiPic

MiPic bills itself as a social marketplace for your photographs, a little like Foap, except that your images can be printed onto a whole range of things and purchased by other users directly through the platform.

There’s an iOS app but no native Android version – though you can still use the Web interface via your phone.

The items that have been bought are then made and shipped (internationally) from the UK. The creator of the image that was used for the item then gets credited up to 20 percent of the sale price, which can be checked into a PayPal account.

While it’s a similar idea to Foap, integrating the manufacturing of the products into the platform was a smart move that helps differentiate it from other image marketplaces.